November 9th

Welcome back readers.

Okay, I lied a small lie last week. I’m not going to plug our money stuff this week. Instead keep your focus on The Jamaican government’s official portal for Hurricane Melissa relief.

This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Critical Community

I see two guiding themes that run through the selections this week: community and continuity, with lots of overlap between these ideas. To start with, let’s look at a few pieces that invoke different meanings of “critical community”–communities of critics, the critical urgency of building community, or critique of critics and of communities.

• Grand Theft Auto VI and the Status Quo | Tearing Down the Dam
  Sophie Grace plots an escape from the circular and destructive Rockstar hype cycle (Further Reading: Mikhail Klimentov on killing the CEO in your head).
• Modern board game maestro Cole Wehrle on getting mad, metaphor in game design, and future projects that are “Big with a capital B” | Wargamer
  Mollie Russell sits down with designer Cole Wehrle to chat about collaborative interpretation around the table and more (Further Reading: Dan Thurot on Molly House).
• I Miss Nintendo 3DS StreetPass & Games as Physical Community | Endless Mode
  Farouk Kannout reflects on games that foster physical connection amid a contemporary political and technological landscape that drives people towards isolation (Further Reading: Carli Velocci on techo-optimism, -pessimism, and -ambivalence in the Death Stranding games).
• A Reading Manifesto | Breaking Arrows
  Steven Santana seeks to exit the cycle of discourse by building up and encouraging a longer reading memory among critics (Further Reading: Kastel on gamedev, critical dialogue, and discovery).

“How can we build up and out if everyone is laying their blocks separately from each other? How can we hope to learn anything if we refuse to look for what has already been said? Illiterate writers removing and replacing the same base brickwork year after year.”

Historical Perspective

Now let’s look at the continuity side of things. These pieces are interested in various notions of history–of historical fiction, of historical context, of the history of art movements.

• Mafia: The Old Country’s creators couldn’t avoid politics in telling an authentic mob tale | Polygon
  Giovanni Colantonio talks to the Hanger 13 devs about the historical class context vital to engage with in bringing Mafia back to Sicily (Further Reading: Yussef Cole on Mafia: TOC).
• Ghost Of Yotei And Other Historical Games Are Rewriting Old Myths | Kotaku
  Reid McCarter looks at the historical fiction trend in contemporary games and examines what its narrative and thematic highlights reveal about our present fixations (Further Reading: Edwin Evans-Thirlwell on KDC2 and the self-defeating problem of historical accuracy as rhetorical dogwhistle).
• IF’s Retrofuturist Roots | TIER
  Phoenix Simms meditates on the critical and artistic returns of IF (Interactive Fiction) using IF (Interface Friction) as a nostalgic lens for futurity (Further Reading: TIER’s recent conversation with Nathalie Lawhead).

“Interfaces are much more provocative, storied, embodied, and rhizomatic than we give them credit for. And IF is the perfect game genre to explore how interfaces circulate collective fantasies of what our societies could be organized like, what those societies could value instead of corporate techno-fascism.”

Arcade Archives

This focus on continuity extends through most of the game-specific analyses I read this week. Here I’ve grouped together the ones that anchor some amount of their perspective in genre history.

• Typing Games Are Cool Again Thanks To Wildly Unexpected Twists | GameSpot
  Nicole Carpenter explores the history and contemporary state of typing games across genre and mood (Further Reading: Andrew Plotkin on Type Help).
• Night Striker Gear: Loves the old, embraces the new | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi locks in to M2’s latest new-old follow-up and finds that the super scaler-esque shmup formula hasn’t aged a day (Further Reading: Kimimi on the evergreen appeal of shmups).
• Another Unfortunate Versus XIII – Lost Soul Aside Review (PS5) | Gamesline
  Rose invokes the state of the character action genre and the legacy of FF Versus XIII in an unfavourable examination of project not ready to assume the mantle (Further Reading: Sam Howitt on the difficulty of treating FFXV as a single discrete work).
• 055: Absolum brings the arcade spirit of its fantasy inspirations roaring into the modern age | canon fire
  Amr al-Aaser revels in a fantastical beltscroller that draws from a rich and complex history of game design and worldbuilding (Further Reading: Amr’s previous writing on the beat-em-up genre).

“I’ve said before that action games are like pieces of music, defined by their rhythms, breaks, and the instrumentation they play with. And if the arcade brawler’s thumping rhythms mirror rock, and the modern roguelike mirrors the improvisational grooves of jazz, then Absolum is a pitch perfect jazz fusion album. A double LP in a beautifully illustrated record sleeve, with a world of beautiful details that reveal themselves on repeat plays.”

Definitive Addition

These next three analyses also invoke an idea of continuity, but apply it to series or single texts over time.

• Forward to Where? | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello judges Herdling to be an incomplete work in comparison to the more fleshed-out worlds of its predecessors, the Far duology (Further Reading: Nick Capozzoli critiques a cycle of empty signifiers in Against the Storm).
• The Truth of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt examines how the interpretive truth of a text changes through revisions, and through our own growth in our relationship with that text (Further Reading: Nikki Fakhoori on FFT‘s memetic paratexts).
• Hamazaki Has To Goh – where does Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio draw the line on casting, and why is it not at sexual assault? | Skybox
  Ashley Schofield examines RGG Studio’s long history of recasting actors who become objects of public controversy, with the notable recent exception of admitted sexual harasser Teruyuki Kagawa (Further Reading: Moises Taveras and the case against remaking Yakuza 3).

“Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio are evidently very willing to recast characters based on personal scandals, controversies, and crimes surrounding and committed by the actors they hire. Yet unlike Taki’s one-time drug use or the baseless accusations against Narimiya, Kagawa’s admitted sexual assault has had no impact on the studio’s choice to cast him for Yakuza Kiwami 3, despite the studio’s apparent insistence on stringent background checks.”

Prey Tell

The horror game conversations this week also have some amount of temporal focus, especially Rayne’s look at Prey.

• The Limits of Powerlessness: On Silent Hill f | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus is getting some very mixed messages on what Silent Hill f says and does when it comes to combat (Further Reading: Ed Smith on the thematic dissonance of f‘s combat).
• Who Are Yu?: Prey and The Power of Self-Determination | Sidequest
  C. C. Rayne looks back on Prey, “difficult” queer stories, and coming to terms with past and present selves and lives (Further Reading: Maddi Chilton on how Prey perturbs ontological binaries).

“For me, Prey put the struggle of queer identity into my hands and let me play with it, conducting my rebellion and fury and hope through Morgan’s story with every run. On Talos 1, I got to bravely reject my former self. And once I’d done that, I got to make peace with them too. No matter what anyone on- or offscreen tells me, at the end of the day, I’m the one holding the controller. I can restart myself as many times as it takes.”

Critical Chaser

We’ll close this week with a turn to one of the most important communities in games writing going back decades.

• The Top 10 Legendary GameFAQs Contributors | GameFAQs
  whowasphone404 shouts out some of the greats in the FAQ-writing community (Further Reading: Kimimi on FAQ-writing).

“Throughout the years, hundreds of hard-working contributors to the site have submitted guides, maps, reviews, top ten lists, cover art, screenshots, and video links to deepen the community’s knowledge about thousands of games across hundreds of systems. Thanks to these tireless contributors, the site has continued to stand strong for thirty years and remained a treasure trove of information.”